I recently interviewed Northwestern Mutual CEO John Schlifske on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is the leader of one of America's largest and leading financial services firm. John Schlifske is the CEO of Northwestern Mutual, which generated nearly $35 billion in revenue last year, and has more than $550 billion in assets under management. John, thank you for joining us.

John:  Well, thanks so much for having me, Adam. I'm really looking forward to it.

Adam: I'm looking forward to it too. Northwestern Mutual has been headquartered in Milwaukee since 1859 and you grew up nearby in the Milwaukee area. You stayed in the Midwest for college and for grad school. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What experiences and lessons were most instrumental to shaping your worldview and to shaping the trajectory of your success?

John: Well, I probably have to go back to when I was a new teenager. My father was a second generation owner/operator of a very small trucking company in Milwaukee. They did very heavy freight hauling, mostly local. Maybe 30 employees at its max, Teamsters riggers. And when I was 13, my dad said ‘You've got to start coming to work a half day a week.’ And then when I was 14, a full day a week. 15 and so on until I was working five days a week. And it was a family business, so it was hard working for your father. I learned a lot about hard work. I learned a lot about physical hard work. My first jobs in the company were cleaning the bathrooms and cleaning the truck cabs, which was really gross and dirty and grimy. And I think my dad's secret reason for doing that was to get me to want to do well in high school and get a college degree because it was really not fun work. There was really nothing about it that I liked. But I learned a few things. One of the things that I think has made a big impression on me is that I learned what it's like to wait on other people. My dad always said ‘you should always be a waiter or waitress at some point in your career.’ I never did that, but I was taking care of people's truck cabs. And I think you just have an appreciation for how you want to live when you've been on the other side of that. And I think that, really, I think that made a big impression on me. A. I wanted to get a good high school education and college education and get a good job and then B. this notion of knowing what it's like to serve other people was very in my head at that point. And that was my teenage years. After that, I went to college. As you said, I went to a small school in Minnesota: I love being a big fish in a small pond school called Carleton College, which is in Northfield, Minnesota. And I went and I got my MBA right away. You really can't do that anymore. But back then, you could go right from college to business school. And I did that. And then I worked for MetLife, one of our competitors at Northwestern Mutual in both Chicago and New York. And what those early years taught me is a couple of things. One is that it taught me the importance of high performance. I really started to appreciate that I was in this bullpen of analysts, maybe 20 of us at a time and it really struck me that you were just a cog in a machine unless you were doing something that people noticed. And the other thing that struck me is the reason that companies exist. And I don't want to talk too much about MetLife here – great company, learned a lot – but one of the things I noticed is I really wasn't sure what the purpose of this company was. And it's especially true of mutual insurance companies like we are, which is you don't have shareholders, you don't have a share price. And I got to be involved with some senior meetings every now and then as sort of the junior guy. And it just struck me how their goal was around growth. Their goal was around size. Maybe I was a Midwest kid, there was something about that that really didn't resonate with me. And I think that's part of the reason I ended up at Northwestern Mutual. It's just this notion to get back to the Midwest, get back to my roots. And when I was 28, I left New York and came back to Milwaukee and started working for Northwestern Mutual.

Adam: John, you shared so many interesting themes there that we're going to explore over the course of the conversation. You started off by talking about the importance of understanding how to serve other people, which really speaks to the power of customer service, essential to success in any business. Relationship building is something you mentioned, which is really interesting to me. You recognized early on you were only a cog in the machine unless you get other people to notice what you're doing, which speaks to the importance of performing at a high level. Finally, understanding the power of fit. Not every company, not every position is going to be the right fit for you. What is? It all starts with understanding yourself, the power of self awareness. As a leader, before you can effectively lead others you need to be able to lead your own life. Self awareness is essential to effective leadership.

John: Well, I tell everyone, self awareness is a superpower. And I'm not sure I'm any good at it. But the best leaders I've ever seen have a high degree of self awareness. And it's the notion that you don't want to be the Emperor With No Clothes. You don't want to be the person that doesn't really know what people think of you. You don't really want to be the person who people only tell you what they think you want to hear. Because if you are that stuff, you're not maximizing your potential. You're really limiting what you and the organization you work for can accomplish. And so this notion of knowing what other people think about you, and being comfortable. They don't have to like you all the time, but you have to know what they're thinking about you. And there's a huge difference between wanting to be liked and wanting to be understood. And I think that's this notion of self awareness, which is, ‘Do I really know if people understand what I'm doing? Do I really know what people think about what I'm doing? Do I really believe that people want to do what I want them to do?’ That's, I think, all wrapped up in what you're talking about with self awareness.

Adam: Regardless of where you are in your journey as a leader, how can you develop self awareness?

John: First of all, I'll start at the end. The more senior you are, the more you need to get anonymous 360 feedback. And there's a lot of mechanisms to do that. But when you're younger, and you're not in the right place to get that institutional feedback, someone once told me that every time you're with someone, whether it's a one-on-one or a meeting of a small group, your first role in that meeting is not to be right. It's not to advocate for an idea. It's not to push for something, or even demonstrate what you know. It's to be an anthropologist or a sociologist. It's this notion of trying to figure out what they want: why are they there? What is making them tick? What is their agenda, and not their business agenda, but their personal agenda, their psyche, agenda, their emotional state? And I don't know if I'm always good at that. But I've always, every time I'm in a meeting or with a one-on-one, I really try to force myself to lean into this notion of observing people to understand why they're behaving the way they are. And I don't know if that helps with self awareness. I think a huge part of self awareness is just being really vulnerable. Not necessarily by saying in front of people, ‘Hey, I'm really vulnerable.’ But just knowing that people aren't always going to tell you what you want. You’ve got to pry. You’ve got to ask questions. You’ve got to let them criticize you. You’ve got to let them say what's on their mind. You’ve got to let them laugh at you when you make a mistake. By the way, admitting mistakes is a huge element to that. We're in the midst of preparing for our September board meeting (that's our two-day off-site strategy session). The first deck I got, you would have thought Northwestern Mutual walked down water. And I'm like ‘You guys, we’ve got to talk about the mistakes we made.’ And I went through some of the strategic errors that I've made. I don't think there's one thing, but it's just this notion of being open and honest, as much as you can with people.

Adam: John, I love all of it: admitting mistakes, owning up to what you do that isn't right, vulnerability (critical to effective leadership), understanding things through the lenses of others. We talked about the Golden Rule. And that's something that so many of us think about as essential to how we live our lives. I'm not a believer in the Golden Rule. I think the Golden Rule can lead us astray. I'm a believer in the Platinum Rule: don't treat others the way that you want to be treated, treat others the way that they want to be treated. Everyone comes from a different place. Where you come from is different from where I come from. Take the time, as you said, John, to really understand where each person is coming from. And as you said, that will allow you to develop more self awareness that will allow you to become a more empathetic human and be a more empathetic leader, a more effective leader. That's right. Totally agree. You joined Northwestern Mutual in your mid-20s as an investment specialist, and you spent the next 20 years of your career rising within Northwestern Mutual before ultimately becoming the CEO. You spoke a little bit about some of the elements that allowed you to rise within your career. What were the skills that you developed that allowed you to ultimately become the CEO of one of America's largest, most successful companies? And what are the most important skills that you think anyone should develop, to get to that next level in their career?

John: Well, I started out as an analyst, and I think at my heart, I'm still an analyst. So there's this notion in my being of wanting to see the data, wanting to understand the data, the absolute results, the trends, the relative performance. I think that's probably a crutch sometimes, but most of the time, it's just the way I operate. I like to understand the situation when I'm making decisions. When you grow up as an analyst, that's your job, good analysis. And then as you become a leader, you don't have to do the analysis but you have to understand the analysis. And you have to overlay this notion of judgment then, because the facts are going to be the same for everybody. So that's the second phase I think I developed which is, how do you see the facts in a way that is powerful, or more accurate or more unique, or whatever it is? You don't want to be unique for unique’s sake. So it's essential to be a contrarian. Sometimes, if everyone looks at the same set of facts and thinks the same thing, what really differentiates you? So it's this notion, then, to use your discernment of the data and try to think about things that make it different, that you see differently, that you perceive differently, that you embrace differently than others. And I think that was the second part of my development. And then when you're an investment person, there's a level of, and I hate the word, cynicism, but that's the best word that I can think of. But then you have to overlay this notion, or maybe we should call it realism, maybe that's a better word. But this notion of the data may point to a lot of good things happening, but reality always interferes. And so you've got to understand not just where the data is, but what your judgment is. But this notion that it's probably going to be different. And so you have to start thinking about what could happen, what will happen, how do I want to react if something bad happens and that kind of stuff, I think that's the bulk of my investment career. And I still think that's part of my leadership style, or whatever you want to call it. And then what I would say within that is that I worked a lot on private equity and stuff. And so I got to see a bunch of different business models. So I wasn't like an auto industry expert. It was auto parts and consumer products and marketing companies and telecommunications companies. We were doing buyouts all over the place. And I think being a student of a business model was something that I really liked about my career trajectory, which is understanding what drives the economic value. How do you accentuate that? How do you use strategy to take advantage of that? I remember my very first business school course. Honest to God, the first course I ever sat in. It was this thing about the snow shoe company. They made wooden snow shoes with animal sinew straps that you stepped on, and they were being displaced by a company that made aluminum snowshoes with leather straps. And the assignment was to figure out what to do about it. And what this professor, I don't even remember what I said, but it was a disaster. But what he said is, you're not in the snow shoe business, you are in the wood and animal binding business. And so the skills that you have have nothing to do with aluminum snowshoes with leather straps. And that really stuck with me. But it's this notion of understanding your business model, understanding what is your core competency. I think that's part of what I developed as a leader over the years. And it's one of the reasons I like Northwestern Mutual: we really know who we are, we know why we're in business. And it really plays to those themes that I'm talking about.

Adam: And it really all goes back to self awareness, right? Can you talk a little bit about how you spend your time today? How you are able to manage the competing priorities you have, and how you're able to optimize your time, optimize your day and your best tips for anyone on how to make the most out of their day?

John: Well, I would start off by saying that, as the CEO of a Fortune 100 company, part of what you have to do is have a vision, okay? Leadership is an action; leadership isn’t a position. You're not put in a position of leadership to sit there; you're put in a position of leadership to say, ‘we're going to do this, we're going to go this direction, we're going to accomplish this.’ Now you can pull data from your team, you can pull data from outside sources, you can involve other people, but at the end of the day, you have to have a vision of where you want to go. You have to say ‘this is what we're going to do.’ And you have to be convicted around it. Now, not so convicted that if something changes your worldview you don't switch, but you have to have conviction around it. The second thing I talk about at my level, and then I'll get to how I spend my day, is, when I was an analyst in the investment world, I was like a pro golfer. I kind of controlled my entire performance. I could practice as much as I wanted. All I really had was a caddy, my assistant, to help me, but I was in my own world. I control it. As you move up in the organization, you move from being a pro golfer, to lineman on a football team, to maybe the quarterback on a football team, to maybe a position coach on a football team, to being head coach of a football team, you see what I'm saying. And by the time you're CEO, you're not even coaching the players anymore, you're coaching the coaches. And so you have to have this notion of assembling your team, the people you want to coach that want to do what you want to do. They want to go where the organization needs to go. If you're the head coach of a team, you can't have an offensive coordinator that wants to run one kind of office if you want to run another, you know what I'm saying? I tell you that because that's where I want to spend my day: it's focusing on where we want to go. And then making sure that my team is aligned in that direction. That's where I don't need to tell them what place to run, I don't tell them who to put in what positions, that's their job. I tell them, this is where we want to go, let's make sure we're aligned on it. This is how we're going to get there. And I try to be at that level. That's the opposite of micromanaging. I don't want to sound like ‘I'm so high up, I don't know what's going on,’ because I told you there's an analytical side. So they have to prove to me that they're doing what they're saying. We need to see the data, etc, etc. But it's this notion of coaching the coaches that I think is really vital to how you spend your day when you're running a big organization.

Adam: And so much of what you shared really speaks to the importance of ensuring that you have the right people around you, ensuring that you're coaching the right coaches. What do you look for in the people who you surround yourself with? And what are your best tips on the topic of hiring?

John: I think you’ve got to have three things to be on my team: you have to be a high performer, we talked about that. You'd never see the captain of a team who's the third string left tag, alright? So the captains are always high performers. You’ve got to be a high performer. By the way, if you're not a high performer, no one's listened to you either. So there's this notion of being able to say ‘I've done this, I've performed at a high level, and now I'm asking you to do that.’ The second thing I look for is this notion of followership. And maybe this is partly humility. And there's a lot of ways to have followership, okay? And it gets at the heart of engagement and getting your teams to be engaged and getting your teams to want to practice and getting your teams to want to work hard. Followership is a spectrum. You can be Ghengis Kahn and get people to do what you want by threatening to kill them but that only works so long. It's not an effective form of followership. You can be so nice that people love you, and they do stuff with you, but on the margin. They're not working as hard as you need them. And so it's how do you build that followership on your team so that people want to work hard, and they want to work hard for more than just pay? I don't think compensation is enough of a motivation. When you're looking at elite athletes, elite performers in any field, it's more than just money. There's something about the thrill of being in the game of competing hard and how do you build that followership? So that's the second thing I look for. And then the third thing I look for is really this notion of alignment around values. We didn't get too deep into this, but the best executives are executives where the people below them believe that what they're doing is for the good of the organization, not for the good of the leader. I don't even know if there's a word for that. We just talked about high order values here. But if the people of this company think that ‘what I'm doing is so that I can get rich,’ that's not going to work. They've got to believe that I'm doing what I'm doing, or my team is doing what it's doing, for the good of this company and our policy owners. That's the third thing that I look for these high order values, so that their teams are convinced that they're in it for them, they're in it for the mission of the company, not for themselves.

Adam: It's really interesting, because so often as leaders, we think about motivation. How do we motivate others? How do we get others to get to that next level? But so much of it comes down to identifying people who are self motivated. As a leader, you can pull whatever levers you can, but when you have someone on your team who's self motivated, who brings that fire in every single day, it makes your job exponentially easier.

John: But my college football coach used to say he looked for players that loved practice, not just love the game, because that's where the real work gets done. That's where the performance gets enhanced. You need people that love what they're doing, and not just for the rewards, the compensation, the benefits, but for the work itself. I love that.

Adam: And it really speaks to the importance of being able to cultivate a winning organizational culture. What are your best tips on how to build a winning organizational culture?

John: I don't know if it would work everywhere, but we are so mission driven at our company. We're owned by our policy owners. Our policy owners are in almost every conversation. It's not trite to say almost every meeting ‘what's in the best interest of the policy owner?’ And because we're a mutual, we don't have shareholders. So our customers are our policy owners. So our customers are also our owners, or that alignment. And then this mission of financial security, I think, is really another great motivator. When – what we do around financial security, you see acute instances of it when someone dies, and then the spouse comes to our company and says, ‘Am I going to be okay?’ And our mission is to say yes. When those bad things happen, and someone loses a loved one and they ask us, ‘Am I going to be okay, financially?’ We say yes, because you've been with us, and we've done the right thing. I think that's a motivator. But I think there's another motivator that layers on top of that, and that's being on a winning team. That's having high performance. That's excelling. I've been on winning teams, I've been on losing teams. It's a hell of a lot more fun to be on a winning team. So how do you create that culture that says celebrate success, that recognizes success, that understands what success is. Again, this fifth order, not the bottom line success, but the success of helping people? I think when you wrap all that up, I think that's what motivates my team anyway. And that's why I've stayed at this company for so long, because that's what Northwestern Mutual is all about.

Adam: Well, John, you asked the question. How would you answer it? How do you create that?

John: First of all, you have to look for people that want to be on that team. The first thing you want to do is you have to discern the people that want to be part of that. I think the second thing you do is: you always talked about the values, you always talked about the end game. Too many people get caught up in ‘what's our quarterly earnings going to be?’ or whatever. And that's not the end game. That's a means to an end. And it's all about, for us, talking about where we want to be and how we want to win, then you clearly define what winning is so that people know. That's how you do that, I think.

Adam: Yeah, no, that's great. Having a very clear end game, clearly defined goals, a very clear mission, a mission that's meaningful, that everyone on your team is going to find meaningful, that everyone in your team is going to rally around. Having an organization that's customer centric. We spoke about that early on in our conversation. A big part of your business, and really right at the heart of your business, is risk management, through insurance, through wealth management, through financial planning. What are your best tips for leaders on how to approach, understand and manage risk?

John: Risk is a two-edged sword. You want to take risk. Okay, we love taking risks. We have a huge portfolio of risky investment stocks, private equities, real estate. The way you manage risk is not by not taking risk. And this is true, whether you're talking about a company or your own personal financial security. The way you manage risk is by mitigating that risk. And there's really two things at the heart of it that get around risk management. The first is you have to be strong, financially strong. You can't be in debt. You can't take on too many obligations to maximize your risk appetite. You have to be financially strong. It's really important. We're a Triple-A company. We're one of the five strongest companies in America, financially. And that strength allows us to take calculated risks which, over time, pay off and generate even more benefits. So the first is financial strength. The second thing, that's a corollary to it, is this notion of having a stream of income – okay, let's put it that way – that is dependable relative to the stream of expenses or obligations that you have. If you're strong but you're underwater in terms of making mortgage payments or things like that, you end up making dumb decisions. So whether you're talking about a company (and it's certainly true for individuals), it's this notion of managing risk by having this stream of income that can protect you against your bare necessities and always being financially strong. And that plays into this notion of integrating risk products like life insurance, or disability income, or long term care insurance. With wealth management, which is the way you manage the investments in your portfolio, done holistically, you actually have better outcomes for your clients. You have more money in retirement, more legacy gifts for your children, more likelihood of dealing with bad occurrences like a disability or death in the family. And what I find fascinating about this is it works at the individual level, but it also works at the corporate level in the way you manage the business. So there's a lot of interplay between those two things. When people – if they really think about it, that's really the way you can manage risk, but also be comfortable taking appropriate amounts of risk, because that's the way you succeed in life, I think, is by taking appropriate amounts of risk.

Adam: John, you've enjoyed enormous success over the course of your career. What do you consider to be the greatest failure in your career? What did you learn from it? And what advice do you have for anyone on how to navigate the challenges, setbacks and failures that they face in their lives and in their careers?

John: I’m getting near retirement so this is a good question for retrospective thought. I would say the biggest failure that I made – I became CEO in 2010. My background was investments. I'd run one of our business units. I had a strong financial understanding of the company, strong understanding of all the asset management, I thought. If I really understood our distribution system really well, what I didn't really understand was technology. And we had run this company with technology as a back office, low cost perspective. So let's minimize what we spend on technology. Let's make it as efficient as possible. And let's keep it behind the scenes, because it's just a tool to run things. And the mistake I made is probably because I don't think I really understood technology. This gets back to self awareness. I really didn't have the confidence to dig into it and I let too many people tell me too many things that I really didn't understand, but I took it at face value. So this fear of not understanding technology led me to not be as deep into it as I should have. And that led to the second failure, which was we didn't see technology. As a driver of business, we saw technology as a cost. And that's just upside down. All you have to do is look at companies that are killing it right now. So my biggest mistake is I was afraid of it. I didn't go deep enough, and it took me too long to figure that out. Now we're catching up our technology. Now I'd say it has moved to the point where it's actually driving our customer experience. Before it was actually almost like sand in the gears in terms of customer experience. But we've got a long ways to go. I've made some investment decisions that didn't work out, blah, blah, blah. But my single biggest mistake is the way I dealt with technology early on in my career.

Adam: What would you share for anyone listening to this conversation on how to approach, how to navigate, how to manage whatever challenges, failures or setbacks, they face?

John: I would just go back to the self awareness. So I think everybody – if you pay any attention, you'll notice that I made those mistakes. I talked about it openly with our board. I talked about it openly with my management team. Nobody's infallible. If you make a lot of mistakes, you'll lose your job, but you're not going to lose your job over admitting you're wrong as long as you course correct. The other mistake you always make is you don't move fast enough on people that you don't think you're doing the right thing. What I would tell people is to have the courage when things aren't working out to figure out why they're not working out and then admit to it. And then, of course, correct. I don't think people expect CEOs to be perfect. I really don't. I think what they expect CEOs to be is good leaders. And there's a huge difference between being perfect and being a good leader. That's hard to do. It's especially hard to do when you're not the CEO, you're afraid your boss is going to fire you or something. It's an endearing and enduring characteristic to build in yourself.

Adam: Yeah, John, not only do we not expect CEOs to be perfect, we don't expect anyone to be perfect. There is no perfect person, there is no perfect human being. And if you put yourself out there as perfect, then everyone knows that you're not telling the truth. You're not being honest. There's something here that isn't adding up.

John: You’re a fraud. That's right. 

Adam: So be yourself. Don't be afraid to own up to things that don't go well. 

John: Yeah, I agree with that. 

Adam: John, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

John: I think the thing that blocks a lot other people from achieving the success they want is this notion of having a point of view. There's a lot of really successful people at some level in the company. And then for whatever reason, they don't break out of where they are. And I think it's because they're used to taking orders. They're used to being told what to do. They're used to being told how to work. And what really people – and this goes back to my very first comment about being one of 20 in a bullpen – what people are really looking for is people who raise their hand, take on additional work, voice opinions that are different. Not to the point of being obnoxious, but this notion of curiosity, ‘how about that?’ I know we're near the end, but let's be curious, bring that curiosity to work. ‘Why are things done the way they are? How do I build on that? What would my boss want to see different?’ I think that helps you break through some of the things that hold you back versus just doing what you're supposed to do in a very positive way.

Adam: We are near the end, but there's something that I wanted to ask you about that I just didn't get to, which is Northwestern Mutual. Huge company, tons of employees, and so many people on your team are tasked with building relationships. Selling, it's integral to the success of your business. What advice do you have for listeners on the topics of sales and relationship building?

John: I think I'd flip it and put relationship building first. What makes our company so successful from a sales perspective is that it usually takes two or three meetings with a salesperson before the first time they'll even try to sell you anything. It's all about fact finding. It's all about planning. It's all about understanding your goals. Our relationship with our clients is not built on products, it's built on outcomes. Nobody cares if they own life insurance. They own life insurance, so that there's a certain outcome that they have if bad things happen. And so it's this notion of understanding what people want, building that trusted relationship, and then working towards outcomes, rather than sales of products. I just think that's what makes NM special: fact finding, planning, trust and then outcome focused work, which then leads to sales. People need to do certain things, they need to take action in order to get the outcomes they want. But they're doing it because they see the greater good, not just the value of a product or things like that. I think that's what makes us different. I love that part of our company. That sort of approach to client relationships would probably work almost anywhere.

Adam: John, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being part of Thirty Minute Mentors. 

John: Well, thank you, Adam. It was fun talking with you. I hope I said something noteworthy, but the time sure went fast. So thank you, you made it really enjoyable for me too.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

Follow Adam on Instagram and Twitter at @adammendler and on LinkedIn and listen and subscribe to Thirty Minute Mentors on your favorite podcasting app.